Alan Miller has seen it all. From the nascent home console scene of the seventies to the emergence of digital distribution and freemium gaming today, he's been there and done that.

Graduating from the University of California, Berkley, with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he started out designing aerospace control systems before beginning his career at Atari in 1977. There, he coded early titles for the 2600 console like Basketball, Surround and Hangman, but, frustrated by the lack of royalities at the company, co-founded Activision. In 1984, he moved on to launch seminal publisher Accolade.

Through the nineties he worked in online games, educational software and advergaming, and is now heading up the North American arm of GamesAnalytics, a company that specialises in helping online games developers analyse their metrics and improve their titles. You can read more about that in my recent feature.

Recently, I spoke to Alan about his incredibly career in the industry, and his views on where he sees game development heading. Here's what he had to say.With all the young studios opening up these days and working in emerging new areas of technology, do you think there are parallels between today's games industry and Atari in the seventies? I think there are. Back in that era, the industry was undefined. I started at the beginning of 1977, so Atari had probably been in the coin-op business for about five years at that point; they'd also been selling home products for a while, but they weren't programmable, they were dedicated game chips. It was great because we didn't know what the game genres were, we just tried to create products that would appeal to a huge audience.

I think those elements are true again now, because the restrictions imposed by retail distribution through stores has been lifted. Game publishers are free to create products for audiences that retail distribution would never be able to reach. They can experiment with new genres, new monetisation methods, new styles of execution. And actually, we were experimenting with all of those things back in the seventies and early eighties.

And also there are similarities in terms of team sizes aren't there? A lot of iPhone and casual games are created by one- and two-man teams. It was like that at Atari, wasn't it?Games were small projects – when I started, they were single-person projects. We did all the coding, all the art, all the sounds… and yes, today some of the very popular online games are done by a single individual or small groups. But it is different now – back in the Atari era we were all practising engineers and computer scientists. When I was there it was never a garage shop operation.

Did you apply for a job at Atari?Yeah, I worked in the Valley for three or four years then saw that Atari was advertising and it was a very intriguing ad. When I was growing up, I was the oldest of six kids and part of my job was to keep my younger brothers and sisters amused so I'd sort of been creating entertaining activities for children my whole life – that was one of the reasons I was very interested in Atari. The other attraction was, they were basing products on microprocessor technology, which was something I wanted to get into.

What did you program on?There were no PCs back in that era. When I started at Atari, the work was largely done on a timeshare system. We had terminals in the office, we would enter our code, it would go to a central computer that we rented time from and an assembler program there would convert our source code into assembly code. We would then download that into the development systems for the Atari 2600, which we were working on. Over time, some of us thought that this was pretty kludgy so we designed our own in-house development systems based on PDP-11 minicomputers – we used those for developing after a couple of years.

Was there a sense of camaraderie there? Was it fun?It was a heck of a lot of fun. I was there for two and a half years, we worked really hard, we knew we were doing something new and important and we generally liked each other a lot. But when I joined Atari it was already a 1000 employee company – there was a significant business in the coin-op space and also selling millions of units of dedicated home electronic games. But, the home programmable group, where I worked, was a pretty small group – we worked on each other's games, we critiqued them, we always showed our work to each other. There wasn't the camaraderie across different companies that there is now, though: for example, Fairchild was another company here in Silicon Valley that created a programmable console – we had no interaction with those guys!

A group photo of the Activision staff in 1980. Miller is on the top row, far right. Fellow games legend David Crane is in the top left corner.

You co-founded Activision in 1979. What do you think of the company now?It's very different now. We started Activision primarily to get recognition for our creative efforts. Additionally, we wanted a small loyalty stream: when we proposed this to Atari it was something like two or three percent, not a whole lot. Their resistance was very odd because they were owned by Warner Communication, which is huge in book, movie and record publishing; they were used to compensating creative people with royalties. So we were surprised at their reluctance to do that with games. But now when I look at Activision, I don't really see much recognition for the creative people within the development studios, I just don't see it. But I haven't been associated with the company since 1984. They're much bigger than I ever thought they would get!

It seems the traditional publishers like EA and Activision are having quite a hard time adjusting to the industry as it is now, with digital distribution and new platforms…It is a huge challenge for them, and most of the old guard have not been successful in the transition to online distribution because they're not used to designing products for the much bigger audience that online affords you. And they're not used to complex monetisation models. When you sell a product at retail, it's a one-time purchase – that model doesn't really work in the online space. You have to figure out other clever ways to motivate consumers into giving you money. The old guard hasn't done that and it's created tremendous opportunities for new publishers like Zynga. Little one and two person shops can be hugely successful if they create wonderful products.

You're now in game analysis rather than development. Has that been an easy shift?It's not a recent shift for me. I developed games for many years but then I segued up into the management structure. I was CEO at Accolade in the late eighties and early nineties and that was quite a bit outside the development process. In 2000 I took a gig developing and publishing health education software for kids and that was great – it was a little bit more on the creative side again. But since 2001 I've been focusing on online games, more in a business development sense than a creative sense.

You worked with David Crane on advergames didn't you?Yes, I joined Skyworks – David started that with Gary Kitchen, another one of our early Activision developers – and they established a nice company building custom advergames, all online just about. They created very large audiences for companies – they did Candystand and NabiscoWorld – those were combined attracted something like 6-7 million unique visitors, even back in the early 2000s.

What did that teach you about online games?There were many lessons – it's a big and complex industry and it's changing rapidly, in fact it's changing more rapidly now than it has at any time in the last 25 years. And two great things have emerged. One is that the transition away from brick and mortar retail distribution which imposed so many restrictions on developers and publishers to this the electronic distribution model which opens up so much potential for developers to address bigger audiences and experiment with different genres and styles of executions.

But also it's really changed the monetisation models how companies generate revenue form their effort. The evolution of the monetisation models over the last ten years in the online space has been really interesting and educations. I joined Skyworks in 2001 I was there for four years and I thought advertising was quickly going to become a big revenue source for games – much like it is for television but it hasn't materialised. And although I remain optimistic for the long term of advertising being an important source of revenue for online games, it's still not close to being big. We have to figure out how to make that work better.

Are there universal laws of game design that run through from your time at Atari?Yes, I think there are, but they're very basic. This is interactive entertainment, the players want their action in the game to change the experience, so there has to be a sense of control and there can't be too many frustrations, there has to be reward, these are fundamental obvious things. I don't know that we can go up to higher levels of design theory, because games are so varied. What does Tetris have to do with an MMO apart from the fact that they're both enjoyable?

Do you see a change in the approach to game development based on having to stimulate revenue in this way? Is this a completely new form of game design?I think it is. Again, it gets to the shift in distribution methods. In order to be successful with a free to play virtual goods monetisation model, the design of that game is significantly different than a one-time retail purchase model. And yes, those models have to be considered in designing a game. That's where the old guard publishers are not being successful, and that's why Activision bought Blizzard – they are a huge success in this arena, and they are starting to experiment with free to play. Then EA bought Playfish, Disney bought Playdom – the old guard publishers are having a terrible time because they consider this transition as just a change in the distribution method, but it's a heck of a lot more than that. The ramifications of this change are enormous.

What are the fundamental game design aspects of a Facebook title?Those games are about what they call leveraging the social grid – the games have to be designed to motivate players to want to somehow engage their friends in their gaming experience – and that's a hugely different kind of game design than what we've seen in the past. I go to some of the old guard publisher's Facebook games and it's a copy of a coin-op title that they made thirty years ago. It might be brilliantly executed but there's no motivation to share it with your friends – it's a very bad adaptation to the monetisation model of virtual goods purchases.

Also, there's no coincidence that Zynga is the most successful Facebook publisher – they have the biggest most sophisticated analytics group. It's 60 people. Some of the other big Facebook publishers don't have a staff at all . Zynga is showing the way, but not all companies are ready to commit to that.

Where are things going with online gaming?Jeez, the future is very interesting. I think we're going to see a lot more people playing games on mobile devices – duh – but they're becoming more sophisticated, the data networks are faster and so it will be much more of a seamless experience. Whether you're playing on a mobile device or on your computer at home. And at some point in the future I do think advertising will become a significant monetisation source for games. I mean, it does tremendously for Google – they're not a game publisher but they're starting to make some very aggressive moves toward the games industry. It will be interesting to see where they go with that. Mobile phones are also developing the capability to wirelessly send information to HD televisions – people are going to be using their phone as a controller and looking at the game on a screen ten feet away – that's going to be a very interesting change for the industry. The console publishers face a very challenging future.

When you founded Accolade I guess you were at the beginning of online, did you ever get a sense of what was coming? Was it foreseeable?I think it was to some extent – in the sense that we were going to see a world of fragmented platforms. We had come from Atari and Activision when there were just a couple of console manufacturers here in America. But when Bob Whitehead and I started Accolade in 1984, we explicitly set out to create games for personal computers and we knew there would be a wide variety. Additionally, we wanted to create more cinematic experiences. But we did not anticipate the evolution of distribution. I can remember one of my board members asking me in the early nineties if I thought consumers would ever switch to electronic distribution and I said no, consumers will always perceive the value of a box. I've been educated a lot over the last twenty years!What have been our most important games as a designer?The most interesting game I designed was Law of the West. I incorporated a system in which the player could do bad things – you could shoot lots of people – but it had consequences. And I think that was interesting – to develop a darker story. I also tried to have all the characters react differently to you depending on what you had done previously. But the C64 wasn't such a wonderfully robust machine and we didn't have a lot of space.

The games that I've been proud to be associated with, Pitfall was the game Dave Crane did at Activision – unique, revolutionary. When we started Accolade, Bob did the Hardball game which was a very television-like experience and we hadn't really seen that before. We also worked with Rex Bradford, an independent developer, to create the first 3D golf game which we called Mean 18, but which eventually evolved into the Jack Nicklaus line up of golf games – it was well executed and was a good seller for us for a long time.

Now you're analysing a lot of games, do you ever want to go back to developing?Yes indeed, I do have that urge once in a while, but I try to suppress it. You know, it's a rough emotional journey creating games. But that's probably true for all artistic forms. You have to put a lot of yourself into the project… it's a killer. It's like that now and it was like that in the early days. We worked 60-70 hours weeks most of the time back then, too. But it was because we loved it, not because we had to…